In writing about the conflict, I could be a good lefty and give you my bleeding heart liberal chat about absolute disgust for the death tolls and
devastation, for the cultural hardening on both sides that these
conflicts incur and how that is the real damage, and why, regardless of
the long-term uselessness of an immediate ceasefire with little else
achieved, we nonetheless must demand a ceasefire.
Or, I could
be a good Jew and write about how Hamas, as an Islamist group does not
represent the Christian Arabs or the Druze Arabs or perhaps even many
of the Muslim Arabs and that those groups must choose for themselves
and write about how weak the Arab League is because they can’t agree
among themselves and how, in fact, some of those members claim to hate
Hamas as much as Israel is assumed to hate Hamas.
Or, I could
be a good former resident of Israel (1984-85) and recent visitor to
Israel (August 2008) and tell you that Hamas needs to recognize the
right of Israel to exist or this battle will never end and tell you
about the desires of Israeli Arabs to achieve full parity with Jews in
the state of Israel, which they do recognize because they do not want
to live under Palestinian rule.
Or, I could be a good graduate of
a Jesuit university who spent spring breaks on Methodist church
missions and never understood how classmates could assume that I was a
Zionist just because I was a Jew and tell you about how separate
nationality, identity and religion really are, to me, even though, for
the sake of coming up with easy to pigeonhole, polarized sound bites,
we conflate all three and come up with enemies who are just as much
flesh and blood as each other and, biblically, brothers (see the peace
effort Isaac and Ishmael, which I’m pleased to say was founded by a
fellow Clevelander).
There are probably at least three or four
more identities within me, maybe more, based on my life experiences.
And you know what?
As
far as what will happen and what should happen in Gaza and Israel? None
of those identities matters.
Read the full post here.